Quick Tip: Boosting Your Retail Sales with Pinterest
1. Think Visually
This should come easily to store owners. You’re selling products, whether they’re clothes, tools or even something like kitchen appliances, and you’ve already got photos on your website of your products. Be sure to organize your Pins in a way that you would your other merchandise, too. If you sell accessories, create one board for watches and another for handbags.
2. Curate and Create a Board for Users
Pinterest brings curation to its finest by “repinning.” In part, that means it’s not all about promoting your small business alone, but sharing related content to draw more eyes to your boards. Plus, curating other people’s content can help your small business become an industry authority.
Don’t be afraid to branch out. If, as an example, you sell clothes, create a lookbook for what to wear this summer. If you sell just clothes, repin items that could accessorize them. Or, if you own a hardware store, start a board for DIY projects. If you sell kitchen appliances, have a board for recipes.
And create a board for user-generated content, which can help Pinners feel more connected to your brand and also give you more information on what your followers’ interests are. User-generated content can also come in as customer testimonials, if, as Hubspot suggested, you asked customers to pin images showing the lifestyle they enjoy because of your brand.
3. Think Keywords, Not Hashtags
Pinterest almost works like a search engine, so when you’re adding Pins, make them keyword-driven. What exactly does that mean? Think about the words that people type in when they’re using a search engine. Now, take those words and fit them into your Pins’ descriptors. As an example, if you own a gift shop, you may have a Pinterest board with T-shirts, so include keywords like, “gifts for her” or “women’s T-shirts”
4. Promote Pins & Have Buyable Pins
Promoted Pins are similar to boosting a post on Facebook, in which you put some money behind Pins to ensure they are seen by more eyes. The social media platform says that Promoted Pins can lead to as little as five times more in-store sales and suggests that businesses start with the best-performing Pins.
Buyable Pins are similar, but go a step further, allowing Pinners to purchase your product without ever leaving the social media site. Here’s more on how to create buyable Pins and how to optimize them. And know that you can even promote a buyable Pin!
Note that you’ll have to have a Pinterest Business account to take advantage of these tools.
5. Research and Reform
Just like your other small business social media, learn what works for your store and what doesn’t with analytics. To use the site’s analytics — which include impressions, clicks and other audience insight — you’ll also need a business account.
